Driver assistance systems, such as lane change assistants for example, require sensor detection and identification of objects in the area surrounding the vehicle. The sensors are often designed for an entire family of vehicles or assistance systems and usually do not allow an all-round view; rather, there are detection gaps, also called blind-spots at one or more locations around the vehicle.
Many vehicles with driver assistance systems have only a front radar and/or a front camera and a rear radar. In this case, large regions to the left and right of the vehicle remain unobserved by the sensors. Therefore, by way of example, an overtaking vehicle would disappear from the detection zone of a rear radar, moving into the coverage gap, and reappear in the detection zone of a front radar some time later.
U.S. Pat. No. 8,493,195 B2 discloses a method and an apparatus in which detection gaps between the detection zones of sensors are bridged by a prediction, taking into consideration the relative speed between the first-party vehicle and the observed target vehicle. As long as a target vehicle is obviously in a detection gap, a warning is output in the first-party vehicle. The warning is ended when the target vehicle is not detected again in the expected location after a predicted period of time has elapsed.
DE 10 2011 010 864 A1 discloses a method and an apparatus for predicting collisions between a motor vehicle and objects in the area surrounding said motor vehicle, in particular pedestrians and cyclists in blind-spot regions of the sensors, with collision probabilities not being determined on the basis of linear movement models, but rather on the basis of stochastic attainability values. No interpolation takes place in regions which cannot be observed.